Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap.
The United Dingdom - stating the bleeding obvious so you don't have to.
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Thursday, 1 September 2016

Representing Nobody

When, in 1998, I told a disbelieving Australian
backpacker that the UK would not join the Euro he mocked. “What?” he said, “The
single European currency that’s happening next year?” We were in the USA at the
time and a small crowd of ‘Mercans gathered as we debated the point. Yep, I
said and expounded my belief that while it might work for some unknown country
called Europe, it would never be to British tastes. He argued that it would be
just like the dollar in the fifty United States. I argued that Europe was a
long, long way from being a single country with a single constitution, shared
struggle, traditions and political values. He was young, so he didn’t really
grasp why we couldn’t, you know, like, come together, dude.

So imagine my utter lack of sympathy for the plight of
the Eurozone today... Now I’m not claiming seer-like powers of prophecy but I knew a bad idea when I
saw it. I admit my aversion probably had more to do with being English – avowedly
not European - than having any deep economic insight, but I felt that was
enough and besides, my forecast proved to be the equal of - better than - any economist on earth.
And so here we are today; me with a strengthened confidence in my original
convictions, Europe, mostly fucked. I try not to laugh, but you know, up yours
Delors and all that.

Another fabulous ideal of the EU was of course the free
movement of people and some deaf, dumb and blind kids still fly the flag for the Schengen
zone. Hey, I’m all for treaty partners having agreements which make border
checks more perfunctory and allow employment wherever you may find it, but
once again the disparity of the member states has created unnecessary turmoil.
As I retweeted yesterday, courtesy of @OffencePolice, “If British businesses need
foreign workers, they can make the case for visas. If the case is ‘We want to
pay staff less’, they can piss off.”

The result has been a labour drain from poorer EU
countries to richer ones, making it impossible for those poor states to retain
talent and they now largely rely on the charity of the rich states whose taxpayers resent them for doing so. And of course, the formerly working poor of
the rich states are being parked on benefits as business prefers to exploit
utilise cheaper and more compliant/grateful employees. As for the absurd notion that legions of
low-paid, low socially-involved migrant workers will somehow do anything more
than fuel the inevitably catastrophic model of ever greater consumerism, long warned against by people
like Aldous Huxley, that dream, too is coming unstuck very rapidly indeed, isn’t
it, Mrs Merkel?

Of course, once into Europe – that great big soft touch
with the flimsiest of borders between it and Africa – migrants from anywhere in
the world can feast on the hard-won riches of the west without ever making any
contribution other than by fouling the shallow end of the gene pool and causing
mayhem. And then there’s that Calais thing. Anna Soubry may believe – as she stated yesterday - that
we didn’t have a positive debate about immigration, but, given that a majority
of her own constituents disagree, maybe they already had that debate and she just
wasn’t listening.

It's a jungle out there...

And that, in a nutshell is it isn’t it? Politicians not
listening. In a representative democracy we don’t want or need a referendum on every
issue; we elect our representatives and then we expect them to actually
represent us and not just assume that after the vote we will leave them to
govern in a vacuum for five years. But since John Major we haven’t had representative government but assumptive government. Tim Farron can whinge all
he wants about Brexit showing us up as fools but his party could be said to be the
most representative of them all at the
moment in that virtually nobody gives them the time of day. If he can figure out why that is - and that is a pretty long shot - he may be in with a chance of understanding why nobody gives a toss what he thinks.

5 comments:

Completely agree. That Soubry woman is a total fuckwit. What is it that she doesn't get? Maybe she has a nice Polish au pair on the cheap, who knows? What people round here are witnessing is the destruction of the culture, their history, their values and their communities. What is coming is crime (already here)sectarian violence (already here) breakdown and war. I can see it, the ordinary people can see it: why can't Soubry and Fallon?

Re Sectarian violence. I emailed my MP (an SNP drone) a few months ago about the unfettered immigration. She came back with the cookie cutter reply as approved by wee Jimmy Krankie. I then replied wondering how a political party which has pushed anti-sectarian laws through the Scottish 'Parliament' intended to deal with the impact from the imported sectarian violence that would make the Old Firm look like Laurel and Hardy. Still awaiting her response.